Thank you so much!!! I'm so honoured to have gotten this. It was a fun but difficult picture to get. I got the idea from another photographer on here (whose name I've forgotten...I apologize!), it was one of those pictures that gives you inspiration and you don't want to copy it, but want to make your own. This person had a fish picture and a water picture they'd combined in photoshop and I think they'd added bubbles too. I decided to see if I could do it all in one go. I asked them if they would mind if I did a picture along the same lines because I hate it when photographers step on toes.
So, here is how I did the picture.
I took the fish from his nice roomy 60 gallon tank and stuck him in a 1.5-2 gallon little plastic tank thing that is meant for carting gerbils around or something...a temporary sort of tank. I had tried a couple different containers, but most of them weren't clear enough or had corners that showed, all sort of things like that. This one worked. The fish is pretty big (they grow to fit their tank, we have 2 "feeder" fish and 2 of these fish that I call waddle fish because they waddle when they swim, and we have an plecostomus so with only 5 fish...they are all large), which is problematic in that there wasn't much room for him in the tank and if he moved too far at all he'd get near the edge and there was a corner in the picture with him. I wanted water moving, I wanted bubbles, I wanted fish, I wanted nothing else. I put the tank on a table in the backyard on a sunny day in a softbox (ie., a big white fabric cube). I poured water with one hand into the tank while I held the camera in the other and took the picture multiple times. I got lots of pictures of him mooning me, 1/2 of him as he either headed in or out of my camera's frame, blah water, all sorts of things that didn't work. I only got one picture out of about 20 I took, and then I felt sorry for him and put him back in his house.
If you do this to your fish, please remember to do it with declorinated water so you don't make him sick.
Doc is still alive and well, and since fish can live for years and years...hopefully will be for quite some time.
The water is blue because there was still some sun getting in there so that is the reflection from the sky...plus there is the opposite fishy reflection too. The fish looks like he's jumping, but he wasn't, he was just moving out of the way of the water. Poor guy, wasn't used to an obnoxious intermittent waterfall.
Thank you everyone, and thank you to the judges for the award! I really appreciate it.
